Creaner’s point is that members pursue access to partners across complex value chains and collaboration for more efficient service delivery. They also want the obvious benefits if possible of cutting the costs associated with development, something Creaner says has pushed service providers to demand that suppliers provide conformance to standards in procurement cycles. That compliance is something TM Forum is galvanizing through its Conformance Certification, which launched 18 months ago. The certification process intends to assess products against the relevant pieces of Frameworx as well as evaluate the information models and business processes to gauge the scope of compliance.

Six Core Competencies

All of the aforementioned work (and that which isn’t mentioned here) will touch on six core competencies TM Forum considers critical in order for service providers to succeed going forward in a digital ecosystem:

• Security: Who manages it across value chains, who controls the access to information and who protects the integrity of the network and customer data?
• Customer Experience Management: As operators lose control of the value chain, what can they do to manage the fact that numerous players possessing indeterminate sophistication will now be in charge of handling critical parts of service delivery, payment and settlement, and so on?
• Data Analytics: How to mine the vast array of data in such a way that you can drive the customer experience by delivering content that is personalized and specific to preferences, locations, and other factors.;
• Revenue Management: How to apportion revenue across complex revenue chains and ensure there isn’t leakage and fraud;
• Product Lifecycle Management: Creation and retirement of the vast array of services in an automated fashion, because you can’t create all new services from scratch. Delves into service and product catalogs;
• Massive Infrastructure Management: How to manage infrastructure owned by many different players.

“For the next three years we will increase focus on each competency and home in on how to become excellent in each one of those areas,” says Creaner.

Overall, the goal for TM Forum seems to be acceleration of a service-oriented approach to leveraging the cloud, the networks and enterprise resources while delivering significantly better user experiences, better end-to-end operations management capabilities and greatly improved developer efficiencies.